Am I a latent fascist?

As a teenager I thought of myself of a rebel, but then when I met kids who really were rebels I realised how futile and ultimately cowardly my attempts at rebellion were. I was, for example, the only child in the history of my school to have been caned for 'Persistent Failure to Complete Assigned Work'. As opposed to burning down the canteen or something that actually took imagination and daring - or even just action, as opposed to sullen passivity. I was, I realised, just a good kid who desperately wanted to be a bad kid. And lazy to boot.

Self-knowledge is a good thing; I know that I sympathise with rebels, I like anti-authoritarian gestures, but I know that in my heart of hearts I'm not a man who's ever going to lie down in front of a tank. So far so good.

But I now have a worrying trait. When I fly, I find myself seething with anger when people don't obey instructions. They say 'in preparation for takeoff, please ensure you seat is fully upright and your tray folded up and locked', and if people don't do that I get very agitated. I love it when they come down the plane aisles as it's taxiiing out and they tick people off. 'Please ensure all electronic equipment is turned off, including mobile phones'; the guy in the seat behind me is still talking on his and I feel my blood pressure rise and I hope they catch him.

I was on a Virgin Blue flight on Friday, and one of the interesting differences between DJ and Qf is that on DJ flights they say you can't switch on your mobile until you're in the terminal, because the plane gets refueled. Now I know that that's a ridiculous reason for not using a phone, but I doubt anyone else on DJ892 does. So as soon as the plane lands, you hear phones being turned on. Apparently the implied threat of the plane being turned in to a fireball - however erroneous - isn't enough to dissuade people.

One flight I was on, as we were taxiiing in, and the cabin crew had given the usual "please stay in your seat with your seatbelt fastened until the plane has come to a complete stop and the captain has switched off the seatbelt sign" announcement, first one, and then a half dozen passengers got out of their seats to start rummaging around in the overhead lockers, as often happens. The cabin crew jumped out of their litte folding seats and raced down the aisle to reprimand the bad passengers in no uncertain terms. I felt like standing up and cheering (well, remaining seated and cheering, more like it). I wanted them strung up, tarred and feathered.

I know part of this is disgust at the amateurishness of some travelers (no, you won't get out quicker by doing that..) but it worries me that I get so worked up about it. Am I a closet fascist? Do I really love authority? I certainly take an unhealthy pleasure in filling out forms.

The dead hand of tradition

Luckily, I was in London the week before Wimbledon, and managed to come home before it started. Why is that a good thing? I love tennis - it's the only sport I like playing, and I love watching it too. (One of my sons asked me once why I was watching women's tennis: "I like watching tennis, I like watching women. It's perfect". Of course I like watching men's tennis too. Try not to read too much into that.)

So why the disdain for Wimbledon? It's all the horrid traditions associated with it. So it's Miss Sharapova vs Miss Williams. Or, when it was all a bit more fun, Miss Navratilova vs Mrs Lloyd. Grass courts. The royal box. Strawberries and cream. It's the Gentlemen's Singles and the Ladies' Singles. It's this bizarre cultural artefact.

There's a line in Richard Ford's "Independence Day" along the lines of "There's a word for people who make the same mistake over and over again: conservatives" (not an exact quote). It's a bit unfair and not entirely accurate. But there is a word for people who do the same thing over and over without wondering why, and that's "english". Every year, they all eat brussels sprouts with their christmas dinner. Noone likes sprouts, and they all joke about it. But they keep doing it. We've always done it this way, you hear them say. So stop!

Pari's

The free 'newspaper' they give away as you catch the train in the afternoon had a copy of a note that Paris Hilton gave to the guy who runs TMZ. (I can't avoid the Paris stuff, I've given up.) Two things, neither of them surprising. 1) she doesn't know the difference between it's and its, and 2) she puts a little 'v' over her letter i. It's not a circle or a heart - or a flower or a smiley face, which I guess we should be grateful for.

Vanessa

Today a friend request from Vanessa. Strangely, her profile is completely empty. She's 0 years old and doesn't live anywhere. She does, however, have fabulous (but almost certainly fake) breasts and a strange bride-of-Wildenstein face.

The really interesting thing about these 'models' is that if you click on their profiles they usually have quite a list of friends. Of course I can't help clicking on the friends. They all seem to be genuine. Why have they accepted the add requests from Destiny, Hailey, Vanessa et al? I can only guess they're just not as cynical and twisted as me, and they really don't think it odd at all that a 22yo blonde woman from Japan would reach out to them across the internet for friendship. Or more likely, they just don't care and don't notice, they just accept any add. I quite admire that sort of naive faith.

Myspace bimbaux.

This from an article in Slate:

'MySpace, if you ask me, is a spam-infested state of nature. The average user page comes with a crapload of embedded music and video players, some seizure-inducing wallpaper, and a bunch of friend requests from "models" who want to "get to know you."'

And speaking of models who want to get to know me, I got friend requests from Hailey and Destiny. Hailey's a bikini-clad blonde who has a digital camera and loves to have pictures taken of her. Implausibly, she 's from Japan. Her profile title says "Wanna get naked and play twister?". Then there's Hailey, she's also apparently from Japan, and has the same interests. One of my favorite bits of these profiles is under Books, they put "bleh, books".

Birds, and Jesus (!!??!!)

I woke up this morning and found these cheeky chappies on my windowsill...

Homeless people often sleep in the park next to my apartment building. They're very quiet (the police station is across the road). They arrive surreptitiously late evening, then in the morning when I look out there's usually a couple of them sleeping there.



I saw this sign in the window of an apartment near the Bridge, the weekend I had one of my sons up here. Any idea what 'one way Jesus' is?

Back from London...

The highlight of my London trip was the helpful voice in the elevator of the hotel I was staying in (SAS Radisson, Portman Square.. quite good, for London). If you want to share my joy, click here..lift lady

It doesn't usually take much to cheer me up but what with the jetlag and my aching back/hip/butt (take your pick) I needed quite a bit.

On the flight on the way back there was a guy sitting across the aisle from me who I took immediate exception to. But strangely enough we got talking and we ended up very matey indeed (although I do suspect he's not all he seems). Perhaps I should be tad less judgemental.... He didn't wear a baseball cap though, I just want to make that clear.

Faux-bimbo, myspace

This time a message, from 'ana':
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hey am Ana am 27 years love to read and also love to listen to music, sports, goin out way am a down to heart person who loves kids and also love to have fun... am the outdoor type and my mom is from newyork
black hair and brown eyes.... Slim / 5ft 5in....
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This is an outrage! With the other ones I had at least had the sense that someone (russian criminals? teenage hackers in Idaho?) was trying.

I do, however, like the expression 'down to heart'. I might start using that.

London

When I first lived in London there was a place near me called "Exclusive Dry Cleaners". If you think about it - and I can't help it - what that means is that there are some people whose dry cleaning they won't do, and that that's a selling point here. Typical.

Drinking.... and London

My hotel room has a trouser press but not an iron. Very English. Does anyone know how to use a trouser press? And why? Pants look ok a bit scruffed-up; shirts don't.

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I went to the football (real football, in Melbourne) last Monday with a mate. I hardly ever drink these days, but I got a bit carried away and before I knew it I'd had two full-strength beers and started to space out a bit. I tried to describe to him later what happened, and the best I could some up with was a 'beer panic', but that doesn't do it justice. If you take Ketamine you can end up in what they call the 'K-hole' and so by analogy this would be the 'B-hole', which does - now that I look at it - sound a bit indelicate.

On the plane (never again a 777!) on the way over I was reading a thing in the New Yorker by Charles D'Ambrosio, and he seemed to catch it, but in a quite different context. He describes having dinner with the parents of friends when he was an adolescent....

"...The easy bantering flow of conversation baffled me. Typically at our house, during dinner, you arranged a syntactically perfect yet cumbersome sentence in your mouth and then gently, slowly, slowly, set it in its proper place... A trowelful of silence worked like mortar; you patted a scoop of it between every sentence to keep the course straight. But with my friend's parents the conversation flowed so fluently I could hardly get my thoughts into it, and when I did they seemed outdated and had this orotund speechy quality that made a stupid thud, exactly as if I'd heaved a brick on the table."

Anyway, I surreptitiously switched to light beer and managed to regain my composure. As you can guess, I'm a very cheap date. Two drinks and I'm anyone's.

London

8am, I'm wandering around central london aimlessly as I can't check into my hotel till lunchtime-ish. I went to Bar Italia for a coffee and ran into someone I knew, which has cheered me up and made me feel like I'm a global geezer. He told me he was just in town from Sicily, and he was a little too self-important about it so I said I'd just flown in from Sydney.

Flight was ok-ish. Justin Long, the actor who plays the mac in apple's "I'm a mac.. and I'm a pc" ad was on the flight. He's smaller than you'd expect. I only know his name because I read something about him in one of the sydney papers yesterday. And no, that's not an amazing coincidence, I assume he was in Sydney for some movie or something and his job is to get in the papers. There was a bloke near me who looked like he was - or had been - a famous rugby player. But I'm from Melbourne so I know nothing about the throwing game. But he did give me that look that says "yes, I'm famous, stop looking at me" but of course he could have set himself on fire for all I'd care. Big bloke, too.

Nationality, and faux-bimbos

During the summer I found myself in the coffee place downstairs from my work, watching the cricket on tv while waiting for my latte. I was joined by a colleague. We watched the tv for a couple of minutes without speaking (do women do this? I don't think so) then he turned and said to me "you blokes are taking a bit of a hammering". (England were, as you'd expect, copping a shellacking.)

I was shocked and dismayed, as you can imagine. It took me a while to realise what he meant. But when I finally picked myself up off the floor, I said with all the dignity and hauteur I could muster "I'm more Australian than you, mate. I was born in f&*cking Wonthaggi".

On a related note, someone once asked me if it was my first time in Australia. Arrgh. But at least that time they thought I was an American.

Faux-bimbos have dried up. I got a couple of adds but I've waited too long to write them up so they've been deleted. And they sounded so real too!

Faux-bimbos on Myspace

Gosh, I'm so excited! I get a couple of add requests a day on my pretty lame myspace setup. And they're always from young women in exotic places who have pictures on other sites - and they want to share them with me! For a week I'm going list them...

9 June, I get an add from Mia. She's 19 and lives in the Maldives, but she's blonde and looks like she comes from a small town in Texas and has runaway to the Valley. She says "I love my life, my family and my friends. I try to have a good time no matter where I am or who I'm with. I'm a low-key chill type of person but am always up for a crazy/fun adventure" and on it goes. There is, or course a button you can click for some (presumably crazy/fun) pictures of her. Her interests are "SHOPPING AND BOYZ!"

10 June I get an add from Leah, a sulty and busty 24yo from United States. Same blurb as Mia. And rhymes with Mia too, how about that?

11 June. Vanessa, 23yo from Wisconsin. Although she's not as sultry and busty as Leah she's certainly no ham sandwich. What she does have in common with Leah, however, the profile. Line for line, as expected.

11 June. Riley, a 22yo from the Solomon Islands with the same washed-out anodyne blonde-but-not-gorgeous aesthetic as Mia. Same profile too.

Nationality..?

I was in a coffee place today in outer suburban Melbourne with my 4 kids, and I struck up a conversation with the women who work there (no, this isn't typical). After we'd exchanged a few pleasantries, one of them asked 'excuse me, but what's your nationality?'

On one hand I was quite chuffed that even though I'm fourth-generation aussie, and went to high school about a mile from this coffee place, they thought I was an exotic foreigner of some sort - I did quiz them, of course. They thought I was german, or possibly swedish, On the other hand I was vaguely worried. I've lived outside Australia for 15 of the last 20 years, am I losing some fundamental Australian-ness? A girlfriend I had in the US (who was barking mad, but that's a different story) thought I looked very Australian indeeed, but that was because of my prominent chin and sticky-outy ears.

I'm going to the footy on Monday, I wonder if that'll help.

Rhymes with 'cheese'?

Early start this morning, the 0700 QF409 from Sydney to Melb. They showed the morning news on the plane, and the lead item was about Paris Hilton being released from prison after three days. I'm vaguely appalled that this is leading the news but I've given up - there are some things I'm just going to have to go along with.

But what was really inexcusable was that the segment had been lifted from some british news show (not BBC - I'm guessing ITV or Skynews) and the 'reporter' did that thing that english people often do. She pronounced the last syllable of Los Angeles as though it rhymed with 'cheese'. It's possible she's never been there, and that she's in fact sitting in a studio in, say, Croydon, and just making it up as she goes along. But it's also quite possible that she's been to LA many times and really should know better. Brits always like to make fun of how guileless and ill-adapted the americans are (they don't know that Chalmondsley is pronounced 'Chumley', that sort of thing, but how often do you ever run across Chalmondsley?) ABC radio tonight they had a segment about 'why should we care about Paris Hilton?' done in a vaguey ironic way so that you could get a real troughful of Paris gossip while at the same time feeling a bit above it all. They had some clown on from the BBC and of course he didn't say it right.

A high point of this sort of thing was when Nicole Kidman's sister used to do the showbusiness gossip show thing on Qantas in-flight. You have to guess she's been to LA more times than I've had hot dinners, but she still couldn't say it right.

Beggars - and religion

This may just be me over-analyzing everything, but there do seem to be definite patterns and modes within what you'd politely call the begging community here in Sydney. I noticed at the start of the year that the panhandlers in Kings Cross (their MO is to walk up to you and ask for money very matter-of-factly) had all simultaneously adopted the tactic of starting their request with "hey Bro...". Did they all have a meeting to sort this out, some sort of new theme for the New Year? Or was it a fashion thing, maybe one especially successful or cool panhandler started it and they all copied? It died out pretty quickly - which I assume was some empirical thing. They weren't getting results.

The beggars in the city have a quite different schtick, maybe as an evolved response to more aggressive policing. They look as wretched as they can (they probably don't have to try too hard, to be fair), huddled on a blanket with a crudely-drawn cardboard sign. Years ago there would have been a dog, but I assume that doesn't work any more. The sign may or may not have some language acknowledging the public's weariness and scepticism ("no bullshit", "genuine homeless", "no lies" etc.) but what it will have in almost all cases is a reference to God or Jesus. If you don't believe me, have a look.

Now this is in a country with a very low percentage of people who go to church. Even the 50% (I'm guessing) of Australians who say they're a bit religious usually aren't - a fun thing to do at a dinner party is to quiz people who say they're christians about how much christian doctrine they actually believe in - and so as a marketing ploy this doesn't sound smart. So why does it persist?

Maybe homeless people themselves are more religious than the rest of the community? That's a lovely notion. But more likely, they think the appeal to religion will shake the consciences of passers-by, and make them incrementally more likely to give. And of course if hard-core christians happen to walk by, it may indeed help.

Of course it makes me less likely. I find myself thinking 'if God's so munificent he can give you a dollar, not me' but then again, I wouldn't give them any money anyway so there's no loss.

If I was even slightly more ambitious it'd be fun to go around taking photos of the cardboard signs, maybe for a fabulous coffee table book. I expect for $5 they'd be happy to let you take a pic. And it'd certainly be easier and much safer than my other great coffee-table book idea, the collection of really stupid tattoos (which is, I know, a bit of a tautology, but you know what I mean).

Back to my piano....